Laser Mame

[rMuD]

We did get to show it off at 6 Flags Darien Lake for 2 years, and take it to the Classic arcade game conference in San Jose one year.. We were supose to fly out Sept 12th 2001 but had to cancel it to the following year. I know Dale has shown in off at CA Extreme for several years afterwards and maybe still to this day.

I had some great Ideas we wanted to do before it was released. Like World's record.. play it on the grand coulee dam. Atari had no interest in licensing the roms so there was no commercial redistribution. Just never came to be...

LaserMAME was improved by Matt to play every Vector Game including Star Wars.. Will it ever be released, who knows.. the two owners of the code do not talk to each other anymore, so it would be more likely that Pink Floyd will reunite than LaserMAME getting released to the public.

Things can change.. we can only hope. But again LazyMame is close enough. But I can tell you Tempest on the big screen is very impressive. as well as some of the other vector games that really really really work well in laser.

Rob.

[polishedball]

That was my little project one winter. I made 2 versions- the first worked with EasyLase (this also means soundcards will work) and the second with QM2000. I believe that the zip file that was on the ftp had a copy of the vector.c file I used. The addition of code to the MAME program itself was very minimal. The rest of what made it work was another "middle-man" dll that received and processed the raw vector data, then sent it to a DAC. This was a separate stand alone project, somewhat disconnected from the actual MAME project. Being a c++ mingw newbie, getting all the linking and compiling to be happy was a real nightmare (for me anyway). I also did a lot of trimming to get the resultant exe size trimmed down, and to reduce the compile time by like 90%.
I sent all the code to drLava a while back, I think he was considering an experiment with multiple DAC outputs, RIYA included. That would be cool.
There are multiple variants of rom files out there, I usually tell people to send me a PM with their email address so I can give them a proven working set. I haven't messed with it in a while, it was one of those things where I just did it to see if I could make it work- I am sure everyone here knows how that goes.
-Mike

What is the base built version of needed roms?

[james1095]

Hi James, another user from Seattle! Welcome.

You can find LazyMame on the PL ftp server.

host: ftp.photonlexicon.com
user : plftp
password:ildaswap

If you get it working, let me know. I've been meaning to dig into it.

I met a guy at work who said his friend wrote LaserMame. I could try to find out more about what happened to it.

Have fun,
Mike

Wow there's all kinds of interesting looking stuff on there, thanks! All that darn real life stuff has been getting in the way of goofing off and having fun so I haven't had a chance to mess with this yet. It does look like there's a driver out there that emulates the EasyLase DAC with a modified sound card so at least in theory it ought to be possible to make this work. Dunno if my current set of 20K scanners is adequate but I figured they were a cheap way to get my feet wet and they'll be good for beam effects if/when I get some faster ones.

[james1095]

A few arcade cabinets could actually be made to play different games just by switching the rom chips and applying different graphics to the exterior of the cabinet. Other boards would play one game only. I believe Asteroids was a single-game board.

Adam

The Asteroids hardware is very similar to that of Lunar Lander, but it is still unique. IIRC, the only Atari vector games that utilized exactly the same board were Gravitar and Black Widow, the latter being a field conversion kit released after Gravitar flopped, and Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, which was another field conversion kit that came out later. ESB may have required more than a simple ROM swap but I don't remember for sure. The vast majority of games in the classic era were built around unique hardware. A few platforms supported multiple games, but usually 2 or 3 at most and in almost all cases there were different controls or other additional hardware unique to a specific game.

Technically to be legal you have to own the actual ROM chips that would be plugged into the arcade board. As someone else mentioned, the console "ports" were not so much ports, as they were games written from scratch to run on a completely different (and vastly inferior) hardware platform and resemble the original as closely as possible. If you are doing this in your own home though it's not as if the police will bust down your door and haul you off for downloading some 30 year old ROM images. The only time you would be likely to have trouble is if you tried to distribute something incorporating them.

[james1095]

Hi James, another user from Seattle! Welcome.

You can find LazyMame on the PL ftp server.

host: ftp.photonlexicon.com
user : plftp
password:ildaswap

If you get it working, let me know. I've been meaning to dig into it.

I met a guy at work who said his friend wrote LaserMame. I could try to find out more about what happened to it.

Have fun,
Mike

Well I haven't tried MAME yet, but I did manage to get Laseroids running yesterday. I'm impressed, it works much better than I expected given my cheap hardware. I modded a USB sound card that was only $11 shipped, built a compensation amp based on the design that's been floating around, and wired that to a $100 set of 20kpps galvos. I'm still working on mirror/dichro mounts for my RGB setup so I tried so far using just a $10 ~200mW red DVD burner diode along with a driver I made similar to a circuit I found online.

Unfortunately a wire came loose in my lashed up test setup and one of the amp ICs in the galvo driver was damaged. I at first feared I had damaged the galvo itself, but by swapping things around I confirmed it to be the IC. I ordered some replacement parts and should be back online around the time I finish my solid state RGB.